A Hen in the Wind (Yasujiro Ozu, 1948)

Shuji Sano and Kinuyo Tanaka in A Hen in the Wind

Tokiko Amamiya: Kinuyo Tanaka
Shuichi Amamiya: Shuji Sano
Akiko Ida: Chieko Murata
Kazuichiro Satake: Chishu Ryu
Shoichi: Hohi Aoki
Fusako Onada: Chiyoko Fumiya
Orie Noma: Reiko Minakami
Hideo: Koji Mitsui
Hizoko Sakai: Takeshi Sakamoto

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Yasujiro Ozu, Ryosuke Saito
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Music: Senji Ito

I was startled by the opening scenes that set up the plot for Yasujiro Ozu's A Hen in the Wind* in which a woman waiting for her husband to return from the war tries to make ends meet for herself and her small son by selling some of her possessions. The woman who buys her things suggests that she would make more money by selling her body. Shocked, she rejects this suggestion. But when her child falls ill, she sees prostituting herself as the only way to pay the hospital bills. The striking thing about this opening sequence is that it's almost identical to the plot setup in Kenji Mizoguchi's Women of the Night, which was made the same year as A Hen in the Wind and stars the same actress, the great Kinuyo Tanaka. But then the plots of the two films diverge: In Mizoguchi's film, both the husband and the child die, and the woman finds herself descending deeper into prostitution. Ozu, however, brings the husband home and the child survives his illness. But there is misery to come for Ozu's heroine, Tokiko: She feels compelled to tell her husband, Shuichi, the truth about what she did to pay the hospital. He does not take it well: He stews with resentment and eventually makes his way to the brothel where Tokiko had her assignation. There he encounters Fusako, a young prostitute, and instead of having sex with her, questions her about why she chose this way of life. Though he decides to help Fusako give up prostituting herself, and even goes out of his way to find her a job in the company where he works, the encounter does nothing to ease Shuichi's mind about Tokiko's actions. When he returns home he gives way to his simmering anger and, giving her a shove, causes her to fall down the steep stairway from their upstairs rooms. It's a moment of unaccustomed violence for Ozu, who throughout the film takes his usual steady, measured course in portraying these troubled lives. But it serves as a catharsis, bringing husband and wife back together -- although not in a way that will satisfy some viewers, especially in an age conscious of domestic violence: Tokiko pleads for forgiveness and even suggests that Shuichi beat her. In the final scene that shows the couple, they embrace and Tokiko clasps her hands tightly behind his back. (The film actually ends on a shot more characteristic of Ozu, in which we see life go on in the outside world in the shadow of the giant storage tanks that dominate the industrial slum where they live.) Ozu later called A Hen in the Wind a failure -- just as, coincidentally, Mizoguchi expressed his disappointment with Women of the Night -- but it remains a fascinating display of Ozu's directorial skills, especially his way of building tension quietly and making his points without didacticism. For example, he uses his characteristic subjective camera to good effect in a scene between Tokiko and her friend Akiko, who is shocked by Tokiko's prostituting herself. Tokiko asks what she would have done if she found herself penniless with a sick child. Although the question is addressed to Akiko, the camera takes her place, so that Tokiko looks directly at us, making the audience the target of the question. I don't know if the similarities between Ozu's and Mizoguchi's films are entirely coincidental -- it's almost as if they shared a common premise and dared each other to make a film out of it -- but the two films provide a unique opportunity to compare the style and technique of two great directors.

*I haven't seen an explanation for the title, which is a literal translation of the Japanese title. It seems to be a simile out of a proverb: "As [something] as a hen in the wind," but nobody I've seen on line has provided the source.

Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)

Hohi Aoki and Setsuko Hara in Late Spring

Shukichi Somiya: Chishu Ryu 
Noriko Somiya: Setsuko Hara 
Aya Kitagawa: Yumeji Tsukioka 
Masa Taguchi: Haruko Sugimura 
Katsuyoshi: Hohi Aoki 
Shoichi Hattori: Jun Usami 
Aiko Miwa:  Kuniko Miyake
Jo Onodera: Masao Mishima 
Kiku Onodera: Yoshiko Tsubouchi 
Misako: Yoko Katsuragi 
Shige: Toyo Takahashi
Seizo Hayashi: Jun Tanizaki

Director: Yasujiro Ozu 
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Based on a novel by Kazuo Hirotsu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta 
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada 
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura 
Music: Senji Ito 

The opening of Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring is deceptively calm: the usual establishing shots of landscape and buildings and trains, the kind of images with which Ozu typically punctuates his narratives, and a group of women gathering for a tea ceremony. One of the women is Noriko, whose brilliant smile is also deceptive. This is the first film in Ozu's so-called "Noriko trilogy," to be followed by Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953), in each of which Setsuko Hara plays a woman named Noriko. The three Norikos have nothing in common except that they are all unmarried. (In Tokyo Story she is a widow.)  The Noriko of Late Spring lives with her father, Shukichi, who is played by Ozu regular Chishu Ryu. (In Early Summer, Ryu plays Hara's brother, and in Tokyo Story her father-in-law.) The deceptions of what might be called the "get-acquainted" section of Ozu's film, which establishes for us the relationships among the characters, lie in the apparent happiness and contentment of father and daughter and the untroubled world in which they live. But Late Spring was filmed only four years after the end of the war that devastated Japan, which was still under occupation by American forces. The wounds and pain of the country and its people are invisible in the film, partly because of occupation censorship, but they provide a kind of tension in the viewer who knows what the characters must have suffered. There is only a brief mention of this in Late Spring: Noriko has been to the doctor and reports that her health has improved. Another character's reference to "forced work during the war" sheds some light on what may have caused her illness. Later, Noriko and her father visit Kyoto, and he remarks how much nicer it is than "dusty" Tokyo, obliquely referencing wartime destruction. The central deception, however, lies in Noriko's apparent contentment with her unmarried state: She feels it is her duty to spend her life caring for her widowed father, and brushes off any suggestions that at 27 she should really be thinking about getting married -- or worse, that her father might choose to remarry. She calls the second marriage of one of her father's friends "filthy." We who have seen this situation before, however, realize that the deception Noriko is perpetrating is on herself. Perhaps because she has lived through so much change and upheaval, Noriko is trying to persuade herself that her current happiness serving her father can be made permanent. And so she suffers a shock when her father displays interest in a beautiful widow, and another when he suggests that she might meet the young man her Aunt Masa thinks would be a suitable husband for Noriko. What Ozu and his frequent collaborator Kogo Noda establish here, working from a novel called Father and Daughter by Kazuo Hirotsu, is worthy of Henry James or Jane Austen -- I think particularly of Austen's Emma Woodhouse and her self-deluding attachment to her father. Eventually, Noriko is persuaded into marriage -- in a masterstroke of direction we never even see the groom -- by her father's lie: He claims that he has been planning to remarry, thereby eliminating any objection Noriko could have to seeking her own path to fulfillment. The film ends with a melancholy image of Shukichi alone, peeling an apple -- a kind of Jamesian twist on an Austenian situation. This magisterial example of Ozu's late style -- low camera angles, absence of pans and dissolves, emphasis on the somewhat claustrophobic interiors of the Japanese home -- is reinforced by Tatsuo Hamada's art direction and Yuharu Atsuta's cinematography, but most of all by the superb performances of Hara and Ryu.

Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, 1951)

Isao Shirasawa, Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama, Setsuko Hara, Ichiro Sugai, Kuniko Miyake, and Zen Murase in Early Summer

Noriko Mamiya: Setsuko Hara
Koichi Mamiya: Chishu Ryu
Aya Tamura: Chikage Awashima
Fumiko Mamiya: Kuniko Miyake
Shukichi Mamiya: Ichiro Sugai
Shige Mamiya: Chieko Higashiyama
Tami Yabe: Haruko Sugimura
Takako: Kuniko Igawa
Kenkichi Yabe: Hiroshi Nihon'yanagi
Sotaro Satake: Shuji Sano
Nobo Tamura: Toyo Takahashi
Nishiwaki: Seiji Miyaguchi

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Music: Senji Ito

Early Summer is the second of the "seasonal" films made by Yasujiro Ozu in what is now recognized as his peak postwar period. The first was Late Spring (1949), and they were followed by Early Spring (1956), Late Autumn (1960), The End of Summer (1961), and An Autumn Afternoon (1962). I mention this chiefly because the English-language titles confuse even Ozu's hard-core admirers, among whom I count myself. "Was that Early Summer or The End of Summer?" we find ourselves asking when we're talking about Ozu's films. The confusion is further compounded by the fact that four of them starred the marvelous Setsuko Hara. It also doesn't help that the name of her character in Early Summer is Noriko, which was the name of her characters in Late Spring and Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953). So we have to remind ourselves that in Early Summer she is Noriko Mamiya, the unmarried 28-year-old daughter of Shukichi and Shige Mamiya. She lives with them as well as with her brother, Koichi, and sister-in-law, Fumiko, and their two bratty sons. She also has a well-paying clerical job and a group of old girlfriends from her schooldays. So why does everyone, even her boss, want her to get married? When her boss starts arranging things with an old business friend of his, her family encourages the connection, even though she's never met the man and he's in his early 40s. Noriko has a mind of her own, however, and eventually surprises everyone -- perhaps even herself -- with her decision. It's a comedy-drama in which nothing exciting happens -- even key events like the search for the bratty boys when they decide to run away from home take place mostly off-screen -- but Ozu holds everything in such delicate suspension, allowing us to meditate on the relationships at length, that we get caught up in the everyday lives of the film's huge cast. There are some wonderful scenes between Noriko and her girlfriends, who share the kind of in-jokes that old friends everywhere have. Some of these are lost in translation, but even that reminds us of real life, when we're left out of a group's established routines. And sometimes the subtitles wittily help us out, finding equivalents for the hick accents Noriko and her friend adopt when talking about the possibility of moving from Tokyo to the country. Ozu and co-screenwriter Kogo Noda bring the characters to life in their private moments, as when Shukichi and Shige talk wistfully about the son who remained MIA after the war, or when they see a balloon floating ahead and reflect on how sad the child who lost it must be. No filmmaker had a profounder sense of the inner lives of people in their ordinary routine.